28 October 2026 | News
Image Courtesy: Public Domain
ANYbotics has achieved a major milestone in physical AI deployment with the launch of ANYmal X, the world’s first legged inspection robot for explosive atmospheres. Purpose-built to meet the strictest safety standards in oil, gas, and chemicals, ANYmal X uses an advanced industrial AI stack to execute routine autonomous inspections in hazardous environments. The robot is now shipping to several oil, gas, and chemical industry leaders, including Equinor and DSM-Firmenich.
“Four years of pioneering engineering with more than ten patents went into ANYmal X,” says Péter Fankhauser, Co-Founder and CEO of ANYbotics. “Many experts thought a legged robot could never be made safe for explosive atmospheres. Oil, gas and chemical plants are among the most hazardous and most costly places to operate. That makes them the prime case for physical and industrial AI, yet until now the areas that matter most were off-limits to robots like ours. That changes today.”
Since 2023, energy and chemical leaders including BP, Equinor, Shell, PETRONAS, Petrobras, BASF, and SLB have tested ANYmal X across hundreds of onshore and offshore missions through ANYbotics’ Early Access Program. Their hands-on feedback helped to refine the field-tested, industrial-grade robot now being delivered to customers. Each robot will operate as part of ANYbotics’ end-to-end inspection solution, combining advanced autonomy and industrial AI with seamless integration into their existing plant maintenance software.
Oil, gas, and chemicals represent the largest and most challenging global inspection markets.
Valued at $102 billion, the global oil, gas, and chemical sector is the largest market for autonomous inspection. Two major operational costs drive this market value: the expensive skilled labor required for manual inspection, and the downtime caused by preventable equipment failures. Because critical components, like pumps, compressors, valves, and piping, are located in hazardous zones, where standard robots are banned, human operators still need personal protective equipment, handheld gas detectors, and entry permits to inspect these areas on foot.
ANYmal X automates high-risk inspection rounds without requiring any facility modifications, navigating complex industrial environments such as steep stairs and narrow walkways. Its integrated thermal, visual, acoustic, and gas sensors detect overheating, leaks, abnormal noise, and equipment wear, logging every reading directly to its corresponding asset. This gives reliability engineers a standardized baseline to track asset health over time, enabling teams to spot early signs of wear and intervene before minor issues escalate into costly plant shutdowns.
Undetected equipment failures cost the world’s 500 largest companies roughly $1.4 trillion each year in preventable downtime. In the oil and gas sector alone, a single hour of unplanned downtime can cost up to $500,000 (Siemens), while U.S. extraction workers face a fatality rate seven times the national average (NIOSH).
In addition to keeping workers out of harm’s way and minimizing downtime, ANYmal X provides continuous, repeatable, structured observational data that enhances digital facility planning models, such as digital twins, giving them greater contextual detail to make them more useful across an entire organization.
Every device used in these hazardous areas, from radios to flashlights, must be explosion-protected, or “ex-proof.” Each unit requires independent certification proving it cannot ignite a flammable atmosphere, even when something fails. The leading standards are ATEX in Europe and IECEx globally, and ANYmal X has been built to meet both standards.
Fixed equipment typically achieves compliance using heavy, explosion-proof enclosures or limiting electrical energy to prevent ignition. A legged robot cannot use either approach. It requires high-power motors and a large battery in a frame light enough to climb stairs, exposed cameras and sensors for navigation, and autonomous docking capabilities. Every one of these components had to be certified ex-proof without sacrificing the robot’s payload capacity, agility, or operating speed.
“We asked one question over and over: which credible event in the life of a walking robot could create an ignition source, and how do we make sure it never does?” says Andrea Corda, CTO of ANYbotics. “Working closely with the certification bodies, we answered that question component by component. The result is a new explosion-protection approach for an entire class of autonomous mobile robots.”
ANYmal X was engineered from the ground up to comply with the oil, gas, and chemical sectors' strictest safety standards. ANYbotics performed a comprehensive ignition-risk assessment for ANYmal X’s service life and implemented safeguards for each potential ignition source. Each of its components has been designed to minimize ignition risk. ANYmal X’s AI computer and inspection equipment are enclosed in nitrogen-filled, sealed chambers. Non-metallic shells insulate metallic components, conductive feet provide grounding, and automatic cutoffs monitor temperature. All twelve leg actuators and its battery are protected by flameproof casings. Charging and data transmission use energy barriers, so no connection is exposed to hazardous areas. ANYmal X’s onboard software monitors the robot’s condition before, during, and after each mission. It also tests durability against shock, vibration, corrosion, solar radiation, and salt mist to ensure all protective measures function properly in normal use.
Thierry Obédé, Chief Revenue Officer at ANYbotics, continues: “A certified robot is only the entry ticket for inspecting oil, gas, and chemicals facilities. ANYmal X is a complete end-to-end inspection solution built for performance, safety, and security. It combines autonomous navigation, industrial AI for data interpretation, and integrations that convert findings directly into maintenance work orders. Today, more than 50 power, metals, and materials customers use this system to run over 120,000 autonomous inspections every month.”
In operation, ANYmal X runs on Shift™, ANYbotics’ operations platform for autonomous industrial inspection. Shift schedules robot missions, organizes findings by asset and helps maintenance teams track changes over time. It connects inspection findings with the plant systems teams already use, including SAP, Yokogawa and SLB. To ensure top-tier data protection, the whole system is developed and operated under ISO 27001 standards.
“Plants run on process data from their control systems and business data from their ERP,” adds Obédé. “The third source, what operators see, hear and measure on their rounds, has always been manual. ANYmal X now captures it autonomously, even inside hazardous areas, and we stand behind the whole chain, from the robot on site to the work order in the maintenance system.”
